The Valley of Decision eBook

for the great part their country was to play; and contact
with the Waldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened
Piedmontese piety into a sombre hatred of schism and
a minute observance of the mechanical rules of the
faith. Such qualities could be produced only at
the expense of intellectual freedom; and if Piedmont
could show a few nobles like Massimo d’Azeglio’s
father, who “made the education of his children
his first and gravest thought” and supplemented
the deficiencies of his wife’s conventual training
by “consecrating to her daily four hours of
reading, translating and other suitable exercises,”
the commoner view was that of Alfieri’s own
parents, who frequently repeated in their son’s
hearing “the old maxim of the Piedmontese nobility”
that there is no need for a gentleman to be a scholar.
Such at any rate was the opinion of the old Marquess
of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters of Casa Valdu.
Odo’s stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment
of his duties about the court, and Donna Laura, under
the influence of poverty and ennui, had sunk into
a state of rigid pietism; so that the lad, on his
visits to his mother, found himself in a world where
art was represented by the latest pastel-portrait
of a court beauty, literature by Liguori’s Glories
of Mary or the blessed Battista’s Mental Sorrows
of Christ, and history by the conviction that Piedmont’s
efforts to stamp out the enemies of the Church had
distinguished her above every other country of Europe.
Donna Laura’s cicisbeo was indeed a member of
the local Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse
every incident in the noble household of Valdu, from
its lady’s name-day to the death of a pet canary;
but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli,
whose Lettere Virgiliane had so conclusively shown
Dante to be a writer of barbarous doggerel; and among
the dilettanti of the day one heard less of Raphael
than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch
than of the Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the
sublime “heroico-comic” poem on the infancy
of Jesus.

It was in fact mainly to the Jesuits that Italy, in
the early part of the eighteenth century, owed her
literature and her art, as well as the direction of
her religious life. Though the reaction against
the order was everywhere making itself felt, though
one Italian sovereign after another had been constrained
to purchase popularity or even security by banishing
the Society from his dominions, the Jesuits maintained
their hold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they
flattered, whose tastes they affected, and to whom
they represented the spirit of religious and political
conservatism, against which invisible forces were already
felt to be moving. For the use of their noble
supporters, the Jesuits had devised a religion as
elaborate and ceremonious as the social usages of
the aristocracy: a religion which decked its chapels
in imitation of great ladies’ boudoirs and prescribed
observances in keeping with the vapid and gossiping
existence of their inmates.